Abstract In this paper, we propose a Deep Active Ray Network (DARNet) for automatic building segmentation. Taking an image as input, it fifirst exploits a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) as the backbone to predict energy maps, which are further utilized to construct an energy function. A polygon-based contour is then evolved via minimizing the energy function, of which the minimum defifines the fifinal segmentation. Instead of parameterizing the contour using Euclidean coordinates, we adopt polar coordinates, i.e., rays, which not only prevents self-intersection but also simplififies the design of the energy function. Moreover, we propose a loss function that directly encourages the contours to match building boundaries. Our DARNet is trained end-to-end by back-propagating through the energy minimization and the backbone CNN, which makes the CNN adapt to the dynamics of the contour evolution. Experiments on three building instance segmentation datasets demonstrate our DARNet achieves either state-of-the-art or comparable performances to other competitors.